16 ms·

Read “Gravity’s Rainbow” fifty years later

159 points by hackandthink 4y ago

sergiopreira 4y ago
Aha, yes indeed! Given AI right now.... A key theme in the book is the relationship between power and technology. Pynchon explores the idea that those who control technology also wield immense power, and that this power can be both destructive and corrupting. Super befitting to the current discussion around AI.
smallerfish 4y ago
> If Pynchon apparently claimed to have written much of GR while taking psychedelics, well, it doesn’t show. What?! GR is very clearly an acid inspired book. Lots of wild ideas and very visual scenes, but I found it tedious to read.
- viscanti 4y ago
  There are some hilarious and memorable scenes that make it a classic for me. Things like the Banana Breakfast were laugh out loud moments for me. As for being influenced by psychedelics, it seems plausible. Lots of scenes are portrayed in a way where you can't distinguish what is reality and what is a dream/hallucination/whatever else it might be that Pynchon has in mind. The shifting perspectives across characters within a scene and the continuous struggle to figure out what's happening, what's really happening, and what's a dream can make for a challenging read. Overall I found it an enjoyable read but I can understand it's not for everyone (but that's Pynchon in general - you either love him or his books are an unpleasant slog).
- cossatot 4y ago
  I tried re-reading Sometimes a Great Notion by Kesey when I moved to Oregon a few years ago. I had read it 20 years ago and loved it, at a time when I plowed through fiction. This time, though, the passages that were clearly written when the acid kicked in were so terrible that I had to move on. Scenes from the dog's perspective (that were also clearly unreasonable, such as the dog associating the feeling of a snake bite with fire, which most dogs have never felt, vs. getting cut or some other feeling that dogs have actually experienced), etc. Cool story, with topical themes in the 2020s, but... we have the internet, we aren't so bored around the house that the opportunity cost to reading this shit is low enough to make it worth it.
- notahacker 4y ago
  And the only thing that might have influenced it more than actual drugs were the drug-infused subcultures of the sixties and early seventies. It's a book nominally about WWII and its immediate aftermath which devotes more time to a subplot where one of the characters going on a road trip to look for a big bag of weed for the cool Germans he's been hanging out with than the resolution of the war...
7thaccount 4y ago
I've never understood what the author intends to convey in books like this. Maybe I'm just a simpleton.
- hgsgm 4y ago
  Books like this are deeply immersed in the political and culture and subculture of their day, so are hard to approach out of context.
- p0pcult 4y ago
  It's verbal jazz, or literary expressionism. Riffs and tone poems. Look for recurring themes and symbols. We aren't taught (in American schools, anyway) a lot of how to ingest these genres of media. Hence the refrains (about abstract art, e.g.) "my 5 year old could paint that!"
  - syndacks 4y ago
    Postmodernism is definitely taught at the college level but it’s for reasons like this most people aren’t familiar with it.
    - p0pcult 4y ago
      Correct
- jrumbut 4y ago
  I've noticed that a lot of people expect books like this to be a puzzle, but they really aren't. When Pynchon writes about Slothrop naked in a barn getting attacked by a witch's owl you can just laugh at it, you can just be disgusted by Captain Blicero, etc. No mystery solving required.
  - jandrese 4y ago
    It is definitely a book I would dread having a test on after reading it. I think its status as "serious literature" does it a disservice in this regard. School teaches us that literature must be carefully scrutinized in order to not miss the obscured meaning packed into each and every passage. But treating Gravity's Rainbow with this level of scrutiny leads only to madness.
saghm 4y ago
I imagine I'm not the only person whose strongest association with this book is the reference in "Knives Out": Benoit Blanc : Harlan's detectives, they dig, they rifle and root. Truffle pigs. I anticipate the terminus of Gravity's Rainbow. Marta Cabrera : Gravity's Rainbow. Benoit Blanc : It's a novel. Marta Cabrera : Yeah, I know. I haven't read it though. Benoit Blanc : Neither have I. Nobody has. But I like the title.
- awhtakwjht 4y ago
  I read the first 50 pages several times
  - rooneymcnibnug 4y ago
    Those are some good pages, to be fair.
- teach 4y ago
  I've owned a copy of GR for over a decade and haven't even attempted to read it. This scene in Knives Out made me laugh out loud.
AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
I bought a stack of Pynchon novels on sale, I've been meaning to work up to Gravity's Rainbow (mostly because of its length, not complexity). I did read "The Crying of Lot 49", but having finished it only a month ago, I'd be hard-pressed to give you a coherent summary of what the hell happened in that book. Clearly Pynchon is not an author I should be reading right before bed.
- viscanti 4y ago
  Don't psyche yourself out over it. GR is more challenging and has less of a clear plot than The Crying of Lot 49, but it's still just a book. For a first read, you probably want a very light guide for each section (you can read it before or after each section so you never feel like you've completely lost the plot - I found this one helpful personally) http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/links/culture/rainbow.bell.html http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/links/culture/rainbow.be...
- readthenotes1 4y ago
  i read the crying a few years ago. it is very re-readable. i don't remember a thing about it.
newhaus1994 4y ago
I wrote my undergrad thesis on Gravity's Rainbow and the book has stuck with me more than perhaps any other. It's a post-modern retelling of Ulysses, for one, but not just that. It's a post-apocalyptic novel but also a novel incredibly concerned with reconstruction following WWII. It's a critique of industrialization, but also a critique of the pop movements resisting industrialization. It's the most difficult book I've ever read--took me several months to work through. But I treat it similarly to how Finnegans Wake should be treated: don't try to understand everything, but rather find something on every page you can relate to or appreciate.
- number6 4y ago
  I read a third and lost the drive. No real story. Description of Life und coping with randomness. Should I try again?
  - newhaus1994 4y ago
    I think it's worth trying again--it has a story, but its plot structure is in direct conversation/opposition to the modernists, so it's looser, more chaotic, and more deconstructed. As such, I read GR forcing myself to let go of the pressure to comprehend the plot and rather to focus on the impressions the book was imparting on me. To be entirely clear: it's weird as hell.
  - jrumbut 4y ago
    Yes, the second third is the best third. Allow me to recommend the audiobook version. It helps keep you moving forward during portions that are disgusting, boring, or jibberish.
    - number6 4y ago
      The audiobook version seems to be a good idea, since it has a lot of conversations. Thanks for the recommendation
      - jandrese 4y ago
everly 4y ago
If you want to like Pynchon but are daunted or put off by Gravity's Rainbow, start with Bleeding Edge (2013)
- jrumbut 4y ago
  Bleeding Edge might be of particular interest to the crowd here because it blends perspectives from at least 60 years of engineering, from the slide rules and rolled up sleeves of Pynchon's younger days to open source and web 2.0. I might recommend The Crying of Lot 49 over it though. It is weirder but also much faster moving.
  - low_tech_love 4y ago
    I really liked TCoL49. It’s a weird feeling, reading I constantly felt like the author was making fun of me, like someone telling an elaborate lie just for the fun of knowing that people are falling for it. But I had so much fun that I just didn’t care; I wanted him to trick me into believing the whole meant something, because the trip was worth more than the destination.
    - itronitron 4y ago
      That book really opened up history for me, it would be interesting to pair that with 'Lies My Teacher Told Me' since so much of our knowledge of world history is based on third or fourth or fifth hand accounts.
    - a_bonobo 4y ago
      > like someone telling an elaborate lie just for the fun of knowing that people are falling for it I believe Pynchon is the grand master of telling Shaggy dog stories. Norm MacDonald was a huge fan of Pynchon, it feels like they had/have very similar humor.
- spondylosaurus 4y ago
  Bleeding Edge is amazing. I think it gets some flak for being a bit more surface-level than his better known works, but his prose is great as ever and some parts are genuinely chilling. Also one of the few novels where I feel like the pop culture references help instead of hinder it. I love the idea that this ancient ex-Navy guy knows enough about Metal Gear Solid to reference it in the context of DARPA and the internet as a tool of the cold war.
tomfunk 4y ago
my coworker begged me to read gravity's rainbow with him so i did. it was a slog. there are so many nuggets of interesting ideas and brilliant prose but the utter hostility to the reader made it possibly one of my least favorite reads in recent memory. i don't recommend it to anyone.
- doitLP 4y ago
  Doesn’t that mean it’s just a bad book? If the intention of art is to communicate a message it fails miserably. I have no patience for the college-kid “grand mystery of it all” thing. Like how so many festival films just cut to black unresolved. 99 times out of 100 it’s just lazy film making. The artist hiding behind a robe of impenetrability has no clothes on underneath.
  - tomfunk 4y ago
    I think of critique in two ways: 1) Did the author, filmmaker, etc. effectively achieve what they were trying to do? and 2) Did I like it? So, in the first sense, I don't think it is "bad" because I believe this is exactly what the author was setting out to do in writing it. In the second sense, yes, it is a bad book in that I don't like it.
  - flenserboy 4y ago
    Sometimes the complexity is necessary and is part of the actual art; it is this case when it comes to GR. Also: for those who like Pynchon, and would like another author whose work requires chewing, give William Gaddis a go.
  - jrumbut 4y ago
    > the intention of art is to communicate a message That might not be the intention. Given the chaos of life, and especially the chaos of WW2, isn't it a little ridiculous to tell stories about it that are neat and clean and have a coherent logical flow? If humanity was like that there never would have been a WW2 to write about. I wouldn't want to only read Pynchon, but given how often we dream it makes sense to read a book that follows dream logic sometimes. It captures a very real part of the human experience that more plot or message focused literature leaves out.
danielvaughn 4y ago
I tried reading it years ago and gave up after a few pages. I might try again one day, but I don't like being actively confused when I'm trying to consume content via reading. It just frustrates me. Movies I can handle, like Adaptation is one of my favorite films of all time, and it "actively resists being understood" to quote another commenter here. Yet that approach translates much better to film than to literature IMO.
- wk_end 4y ago
  Adaptation is a great movie but I wouldn't really say it resists being understood - it tells a fairly straightforward narrative (the only catch, I guess, is the question of how much of the climax and denouement is "real" and how much of it is "cinema"). Even Charlie Kaufman's most recent film, "I'm Thinking of Ending Things", fits that bill an awful lot more I think.
- alehlopeh 4y ago
  Is consuming content by reading different than just reading?
  - danielvaughn 4y ago
    Nope, a more concise way to phrase what I was trying to say was "reading" vs "watching".
the__alchemist 4y ago
I felt as I did reading parts 2 and 3 of The Divine Comedy; lost and humbled. I gave up after scratching the surface.
hackandthink 4y ago
I read "Gravity's Rainbow" ages ago when I had all the time of the world. Joshua Cohen's "Book of Numbers" feels sometimes pynchonesque. It's easier to read and set in the 90s. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/240498/book-of-numbers-by-joshua-cohen/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/240498/book-of-numb...
rooneymcnibnug 4y ago
My favorite book of all time, and still so extremely prescient to American culture/society. I wrote about a personal connection to this book - also touching on the idea of the preterite and paranoia - here: https://rooneymcnibnug.github.io/writing/2022/05/19/The-Watchers-and-Their-Zones.html https://rooneymcnibnug.github.io/writing/2022/05/19/The-Watc...
jackconsidine 4y ago
My attempt at GR was humbling. It took months, and like the author of this piece, I came away wondering what it was even about. Most advice I read insisted that I shouldn't get hung up on the details. Indeed, this and V. both kind of read like a dream to me, where I could subconsciously tune in and out and focus on certain details, but not all of them. That probably was the best tact for me, though I got to the end, frustrated at how many loose threads I was holding. Oh I also really didn't enjoy the constant song inventions- there probably were 50 of them and I had a hard time appreciating them
drivers99 4y ago
> put it down, and thought, like hundreds of thousands of other readers, I suspect, What The Hell Was That About? Oh, there was a story, there were characters, and it was possible to say what the book was “about” in banal terms. But I didn’t understand it at all. That's how I felt after reading the "The Illuminatus! Trilogy". Wikipedia says it's also postmodern so maybe that's why.
- lubesGordi 4y ago
  Every time I read a description of GR I think Robert Anton Wilson was probably inspired by that when he wrote The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Illuminatus is probably easier to understand though. Lots of references to Joyce in Illuminatus also. It's probably good prereq reading to GR.
- mherdeg 4y ago
  I powered through Illuminatus! -- it felt like a beach read version of Foucault's Pendulum to me. I loved it, but it's kind of astonishing that only a few things have stuck with me * Posters signed "The MGT" * The charming Rand satire * The idea of the word "fnord" * The feeling of the counterculture -- a kind of sheer weird paranoia where magic can be real. I have a paper copy I still leaf through but what stuck with me is that there was a time and place where it made perfect sense to go out and levitate the Pentagon. This book explains, or purports to explain, a certain kind of weirdness that underlies a lot of the stories about the 60s and 70s.
scott-smith_us 4y ago
I've tried to get through Gravity's Rainbow at least three times over the years, and I've always given up after a week or two. No matter how far in I get on each attempt, I'm just lost as to what's going on, who's talking, and how things are connected...
- nemo44x 4y ago
  > No matter how far in I get on each attempt, I'm just lost as to what's going on, who's talking, and how things are connected... That's totally normal for the first couple hundred pages. Just keep reading. Infinite Jest was sort of similar in this regard. But eventually you and the book come together and it really begins to flow. There's some really good stories and ideas in there, even after all these years. It's worth it.
  - havblue 4y ago
    Having enjoyed infinite jest, I was looking for comparisons trying to determine if I could make it through GR as well. Reddit says Gravity's Rainbow makes infinite jest look like twilight in comparison...
    - romanhn 4y ago
      I posted about it above, but I tried to read Gravity's Rainbow right after Infinite Jest. While the latter was a bit confusing to follow early on, once you make sense of characters, it's pretty easy to keep going. The writing was fairly straightforward (even including the million side notes). I cannot say the same for GR. I gave up a third to a quarter in, having realized that I have no idea what's going on and that I can only follow the story line based on the Wikipedia summary. It definitely felt like a different level of convoluted compared to IJ.
      - nemo44x 4y ago
        I think you may have dropped GR right when it started to pick up a thread. You have to be willing to page back here and there when you pick up a reference you think you heard earlier to get clarity, but I had this with IJ too. Trust me, GR really starts to flow and becomes really funny. It’s literature crafted at a super high level of skill. I guess my point is you start to follow certain characters, certain other ones pop up again and again, and some come and go. It isn’t unusual to page back and reread a bit to refresh. But it really becomes a page turner eventually.
karaterobot 4y ago
I wrote a paper on Gravity's Rainbow without reading it, and got an A- on it, from which I conclude the professor either had not read my paper, or had not read Gravity's Rainbow. Either are possible. I prefer to believe that nobody has ever actually read Gravity's Rainbow.
- paddw 4y ago
  I think you can get an A- on a paper these days for writing anything remotely representing a cogent or lucid train of thought.
  - itronitron 4y ago
    The comedian Father Guido Sarducci has a great joke about that.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    You're describing much higher standards than what's the case...
- Verdex 4y ago
  I've only ever read the wikipedia summary. And from that much I actually wonder if the professor having read Gravity's Rainbow was more likely to have given your paper an A- than another professor who hadn't. Like the book sounds like if you were to truly understand it then you would no longer understand reality. And this suggests an interesting thought experiment in human comprehensibility. Does there exist some media where a totally ignorant analysis becomes more compelling once you have actually experienced the media being analyzed versus before you have experienced the media.
- not2b 4y ago
  I read it, decades ago. I have to confess that i skipped some of the dryer parts, so I probably read 80% of it. There were parts that were just amazing, and other parts not so much so. It was well worth it.
- notahacker 4y ago
justinator 4y ago
I never read the book Gravity's Rainbow, but I had an art book that had a drawing for each page of Gravity's Rainbow, which makes me both want to read the book, and certainly not want to read the book, https://www.amazon.com/Pictures-Showing-Happens-Pynchons-Gravitys/dp/0977312798 https://www.amazon.com/Pictures-Showing-Happens-Pynchons-Gra...
- I_complete_me 4y ago
  At eighteen and a student of Civil Engineering in Cork, I got a J1 student visa to work in the USA for the summer. I recollect that I came across Gravity's Rainbow in a random bookshop in New York. It was lionized and it looked difficult so I bought it. I was staying in Far Rockaway and working on East 52nd Street in New York so the overall daily commute time was about 5 hours with numerous changes. I finished the book in the three months I was in America. When I came home, most people I spoke to about the book assumed that I'd lost my mind. I've never yet met anyone that has read it. I should add that a lot of it went over my head. I also managed to crack Rubik's Cube that summer. Heady days. That's over 40 years ago.
tatrajim 4y ago
In a powerful, if indirect, way Gravity's Rainbow changed my life. The idea that V2 rockets pockmarked London in a Poisson distribution blew my young mind. How could randomness be predicted?! It prompted me later to take a number of courses in statistics and probability, which deeply informed my academic career. Also, the sheer myth making of Thomas Pynchon as a literary hermit (rarely photographed or interviewed) proved influential on how I have chosen to live, albeit at a very different level of fame.
XorNot 4y ago
Good lord I got through, I think maybe a third of this before wiki'ing the synopsis and then putting it down forever. It goes absolutely no nowhere and I'm immensely glad I didn't waste my time.
nemo44x 4y ago
The great themes of this book to me are: Power is pathological and is a systemic thing. There are not conspiracies - it gains function from itself and the incentives it brings along with it, which go back into the system of power and make it even more powerful. Everyone just sort of goes along with it because it's just the way things are. Pavlov's dog is brought up often to sort of illustrate this. Of course like many post modern works of fiction and philosophy it blames just about everything on capitalism, which I don't agree with for a number of reasons, #1 being we haven't really had capitalism since the 1930s. We've had something far worse which is this managed economy and governance - a system of managerial elite that we call capitalism, but it ins't. But, the type of system doesn't matter in this book. The point is wars and things as crazy as an ICBM (the book really made me think of how insane it is to have designed a missile that destroys random people 100's of miles away) exist not for political reasons so much as money and acquiring power/money. Politics hardly matters and is a distraction to get people to buy into the stupidity of it all. In essence, a condemnation of consumerist culture which has taken the world by storm since this was published. It's actually a prescient book today with AI as it's also a critique of technology and how it doesn't free us, quite the opposite, and will probably end up in the destruction of man. Either with nukes as the book is obsessed with or climate, or naughty AI. Now the best part of the book and saddest is that all this is happening. It's the natural state of mankind. But there's no way to avoid it. It's inevitable. You can't change the world. Because anything you do that you believe is changing it will just be co-opd. We see this in everything today. Any kind "Revolutionary Change" is immediately used up by corporations that see to march in lockstep as if it's a conspiracy. But it's not - it's a numbers game based on incentives. The advice granted in the book is to fly under the radar, it is all you can do. Do not participate in society at large. Do not try and change it as anything good you make will just be used for evil eventually. (like the rockets in the book. invented initially by hobbyists who wanted to go to space; co-opted by politics to make bombs) Simply avoid it and find love and friends and happiness apart from the hideous system that strangles us.
KyleBrandt 4y ago
If reading, I would recommend a companion book, makes it easy to check references if you feel like you are missing too many things while reading. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0820328073/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&qid=&sr= https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0820328073/ref=tmm_pap_swatch...
deleted 4y ago
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randrus 4y ago
Read GR yonks ago, and it nearly killed me, but I still remember laughing til I cried at his description of being fed candies by the roommate of the woman he was pursuing. And growing bananas. I have no plans to read it again. OTOH I re-read V and The Crying of Lot 49 every decade or so and always have good time. But I liked Infinite Jest and have never made it cover-to-cover on anything by Joyce or Beckett.
- stevenwoo 4y ago
  I read it when availability was a huge virtue in the summer about forty years ago, it was either read it or reread something else. All I remember is the V2 development story and the guy who got off by eating excrement.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago
Gravity's Rainbow was supposed hard for me to read I thought COVID might have permanently damaged my brain. The whole work has this meandering dream-like quality that only achieves some semblance of a normal narratove for a few moments in the middle (the tip of the parabola I suppose). I would read several paragraphs and wonder how the hell we'd got to wherever we were, because it didn't seem related to where we were a page ago and I couldn't even remember what happened in between. I sometimes feel asleep mere sentences into a reading session. It took me nearly a year to work through. It is a fascinating work though, full of nuances and themes and connections everywhere you look. I probably only caught about a tenth of them. In that way it makes sense that Jonathan Blow referenced Gravity's Rainbow when talking about The Witness.
bigboxthrw 4y ago
good god. reading all these comments of how most have rarely made it past a small part of the book, how it is incomprehensible, how it is just like 2 other incomprehensible books, simply because the author decided to bury the reader under obscure and occult references to make them feel stupid instead of putting the book down and saying what crap. the book clearly sucks but you can't say that in polite company and must use a throwaway account. but you all know it is true. if that style was actually writing it could support writing short stories. why are these incomprehensible train wrecks of words always thousands of pages long? what is the author hiding behind the verbal gush?
- csb6 4y ago
  The book is 760 pages. That’s slightly less than Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It is a standalone book, too, so no need to read a series of books to prepare (each of those could be 100s of pages as well!). In terms of plot-per-page, Pynchon is extremely efficient, if what you want is content. There are tons of characters and many subplots. It certainly isn’t “thousands of pages” long. Novels are by definition long-form stories. If what you want is a short story, a novel is never going to be a good fit.
  - the__alchemist 4y ago
    I don't think the page count is a good metric here. For me, to comprehend something like this, I have to read, pause, ponder "what is going on?", reread etc. Sentence by sentence. For something easier, I can read fluidly. As a contrast, picture Neal Stephenson novels. Long! But I can read them ~5x faster than an equiv length of GR.
    - csb6 4y ago
      I agree, page count is a bad way to judge books. I was using the parent comment’s logic, which disparaged Pynchon for writing long novels and implied that long novels are less valuable.
    - stuxnet79 4y ago
loudandskittish 4y ago
Damn, these comments are scaring me. I recently added the book to my to-read list after learning that it was a big influence on Hideo Kojima, but now I'm worried about what I'm getting myself into. I suppose I should at least, finally, finish Infinite Jest to prime myself.
egl2021 4y ago
Philip Morrison praised GR in his Scientific American column. That was good enough for me: I read GR and eventually all of Pynchon's other novels. V is one of the books I fall back on when I need something for a trip with lots of expected airport layovers.
uxp100 4y ago
Gravity’s Rainbow also has a lot to say about race relations (in the 60s in the US) and colonialism. Just saying it Since it hasn’t been mentioned and I’d consider that one of its more important themes. Another thing not mentioned is the rather casual sex with children, though I think there is some argument on Bianca’s age. There’s probably a million other themes, odd occurances, extremely long joke setups, and disgusting or offensive passages that haven’t been mentioned. But my advice is read it with a guide, a reading group, or a podcast (Pynchon in public is one such podcast). And don’t fret over following it closely, or sometimes, at all. You can always read it again. I’m not exactly a Pynchon superfan, I love many of his quirks others hate (the songs, the names) but the long novels are just a bit too much for me. I do think it’s worth a try. You can always quit, it’s a 50 year old novel, not many people are really all that attached to it anymore. Its cultural influence is waning.
- rokkitmensch 4y ago
  I filed Bianca under the horrors of war along with the kids camps where the V1 staff got to visit with their children. The book in question is magical, hilarious, scatological, horrifying. There are scenes and themes from it burned into my consciousness as ineradicably as the slow stab from Saving Private Ryan. Like the turd-swallowing one!
VagueMag 4y ago
"So Gravity's Rainbow, in the sense that it's about how humans act in global systems of control, is really about the birth of the Internet." ... "Pynchon's intent was to expose the incorporation of the Nazi project into US militarism. Requires a specific kind of critical engagement." https://twitter.com/cuttlefish_btc/status/701271529565384704?t=h3bxN3F2rZ2klCNrj2qc5A&s=19 https://twitter.com/cuttlefish_btc/status/701271529565384704...
- crabkin 4y ago
  Honestly there's some element of that in there, quite obviously with all the operation paperclip innuendo, I mean after the war was won, one of the first orders of business was copying the rocket from the Germans. Recently I read about Peter Thiel's favorite philosopher Rene Girard, and having in mind GR which I read this last year, and the whole thing about burnt offerings, about the illusion of two sides, etc.. Has me thinking there's also a whole thing about "cosmic" scapegoating, human sacrifice, etc.. all mashed up in there too.
  - VagueMag 4y ago
    We didn't just copy the rockets from them though, their leadership was absorbed into the highest levels of the U.S./NATO military/intelligence/scientific communities. I feel like the NASA stuff gets all the attention while almost none is paid to the mind control (definitely alluded to in GR) and biological/chemical/nuclear warfare research. (In paranoid conspiracy circles I've even heard some ~interesting~ questions posed about Thiel's family background!)
jonjacky 4y ago
I think it is notable that I read it when it came out fifty years ago, and haven't re-read it since, but I still remember many scenes vividly - I remember parts of it much better than most books I read back then, or in the years since. The book is a mosaic, or collage, of a many short pieces ranging from just a few, to several, or many, pages each. They vary from funny and silly to deliberately revolting or horrifying. This mix is very unsettling but I found it effective. Instead of a clear plot or narrative line, all these fragments have a cumulative effect -- this makes the book impossible to summarize. Scattered amongst the fragments are some with significant mathematical and engineering content. For example there is an explanation of how the onboard V-2 guidance circuits use capacitors to accumulate charge, performing a double integration to calculate distance travelled from acceleration, to determine when to turn off the engine. I found this quite surprising and unusual at the time. I think it still would be today.
julianeon 4y ago
This part of the review comes dangerously close to clickbait grifting: > Pynchon has become an infinite play space for academics, just as all his books are still in print and read by ordinary people, but somehow the arbiters of literary taste on both sides of the Atlantic decided long ago that Pynchon was Not Serious and so Not of Interest. The thing is that academics are the arbiters of literary taste. So a book cannot be both “an infinite play space” for an audience while being simultaneously “Not of Interest” to that audience. It can be one, or it can be the other, but it can’t be both.
- oska 4y ago
  > The thing is that academics are the arbiters of literary taste Is that true? I wouldn't have thought so. Professors of literature are a fairly new thing (say one hundred years) while literary taste has been a thing for many hundreds of years. I'd suggest that other/former arbiters of literary taste would include intellectuals, literary salons, the aristocracy, the clergy, other writers, and always too a populist element (books without any appeal to the populace rarely survive to be elevated to the canon).
alex-moon 4y ago
I read this book in full back in my early 20s, before I had much real life experience. I've tried to read it again since then, but I always get to the story of Franz Poekler, right in the middle, and it's so upsetting that I have to put the book away at that point.
vibrolax 4y ago
I was defeated in my first couple of attempts to reach page 100 in _GR_, so I picked up _The Crying of Lot 49_ to get a handle on pynchonism. That confirmed for me that reading _GR_ would pay off, if I could get past the early world building. Pynchon replaced Vonnegut as a central voice in my worldview, as I felt Vonnegut had settled into self-plagiarism. Thirty years later, Vonnegut is restored to his rightful place in my worldview, along with Pynchon (who has since become the self-plagiarizer). There is plenty of redeeming value.
MaysonL 4y ago
https://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Gravity%27s_Rainbow_-_Page_by_Page https://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?titl...
dogman1050 4y ago
This is the only book I've ever thrown away. I bought it while an engineering undergrad and couldn't stay interested. I tried again 10 years later and gave up. Tried it again when I was about 40 and decided I would never get through it and didn't want to be tempted anymore. I already have a bigger reading list than I can ever finish in my lifetime.

159 points by hackandthink 4y ago

Aha, yes indeed! Given AI right now.... A key theme in the book is the relationship between power and technology. Pynchon explores the idea that those who control technology also wield immense power, and that this power can be both destructive and corrupting. Super befitting to the current discussion around AI.

smallerfish 4y ago

> If Pynchon apparently claimed to have written much of GR while taking psychedelics, well, it doesn’t show. What?! GR is very clearly an acid inspired book. Lots of wild ideas and very visual scenes, but I found it tedious to read.

viscanti 4y ago
There are some hilarious and memorable scenes that make it a classic for me. Things like the Banana Breakfast were laugh out loud moments for me. As for being influenced by psychedelics, it seems plausible. Lots of scenes are portrayed in a way where you can't distinguish what is reality and what is a dream/hallucination/whatever else it might be that Pynchon has in mind. The shifting perspectives across characters within a scene and the continuous struggle to figure out what's happening, what's really happening, and what's a dream can make for a challenging read. Overall I found it an enjoyable read but I can understand it's not for everyone (but that's Pynchon in general - you either love him or his books are an unpleasant slog).
cossatot 4y ago
I tried re-reading Sometimes a Great Notion by Kesey when I moved to Oregon a few years ago. I had read it 20 years ago and loved it, at a time when I plowed through fiction. This time, though, the passages that were clearly written when the acid kicked in were so terrible that I had to move on. Scenes from the dog's perspective (that were also clearly unreasonable, such as the dog associating the feeling of a snake bite with fire, which most dogs have never felt, vs. getting cut or some other feeling that dogs have actually experienced), etc. Cool story, with topical themes in the 2020s, but... we have the internet, we aren't so bored around the house that the opportunity cost to reading this shit is low enough to make it worth it.
notahacker 4y ago
And the only thing that might have influenced it more than actual drugs were the drug-infused subcultures of the sixties and early seventies. It's a book nominally about WWII and its immediate aftermath which devotes more time to a subplot where one of the characters going on a road trip to look for a big bag of weed for the cool Germans he's been hanging out with than the resolution of the war...

7thaccount 4y ago

I've never understood what the author intends to convey in books like this. Maybe I'm just a simpleton.

hgsgm 4y ago
Books like this are deeply immersed in the political and culture and subculture of their day, so are hard to approach out of context.
p0pcult 4y ago
It's verbal jazz, or literary expressionism. Riffs and tone poems. Look for recurring themes and symbols. We aren't taught (in American schools, anyway) a lot of how to ingest these genres of media. Hence the refrains (about abstract art, e.g.) "my 5 year old could paint that!"
- syndacks 4y ago
  Postmodernism is definitely taught at the college level but it’s for reasons like this most people aren’t familiar with it.
  - p0pcult 4y ago
    Correct
jrumbut 4y ago
I've noticed that a lot of people expect books like this to be a puzzle, but they really aren't. When Pynchon writes about Slothrop naked in a barn getting attacked by a witch's owl you can just laugh at it, you can just be disgusted by Captain Blicero, etc. No mystery solving required.
- jandrese 4y ago
  It is definitely a book I would dread having a test on after reading it. I think its status as "serious literature" does it a disservice in this regard. School teaches us that literature must be carefully scrutinized in order to not miss the obscured meaning packed into each and every passage. But treating Gravity's Rainbow with this level of scrutiny leads only to madness.

saghm 4y ago

I imagine I'm not the only person whose strongest association with this book is the reference in "Knives Out": Benoit Blanc : Harlan's detectives, they dig, they rifle and root. Truffle pigs. I anticipate the terminus of Gravity's Rainbow. Marta Cabrera : Gravity's Rainbow. Benoit Blanc : It's a novel. Marta Cabrera : Yeah, I know. I haven't read it though. Benoit Blanc : Neither have I. Nobody has. But I like the title.

awhtakwjht 4y ago
I read the first 50 pages several times
- rooneymcnibnug 4y ago
  Those are some good pages, to be fair.
teach 4y ago
I've owned a copy of GR for over a decade and haven't even attempted to read it. This scene in Knives Out made me laugh out loud.

AdmiralAsshat 4y ago

I bought a stack of Pynchon novels on sale, I've been meaning to work up to Gravity's Rainbow (mostly because of its length, not complexity). I did read "The Crying of Lot 49", but having finished it only a month ago, I'd be hard-pressed to give you a coherent summary of what the hell happened in that book. Clearly Pynchon is not an author I should be reading right before bed.

viscanti 4y ago
Don't psyche yourself out over it. GR is more challenging and has less of a clear plot than The Crying of Lot 49, but it's still just a book. For a first read, you probably want a very light guide for each section (you can read it before or after each section so you never feel like you've completely lost the plot - I found this one helpful personally) http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/links/culture/rainbow.bell.html http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/links/culture/rainbow.be...
readthenotes1 4y ago
i read the crying a few years ago. it is very re-readable. i don't remember a thing about it.

newhaus1994 4y ago

I wrote my undergrad thesis on Gravity's Rainbow and the book has stuck with me more than perhaps any other. It's a post-modern retelling of Ulysses, for one, but not just that. It's a post-apocalyptic novel but also a novel incredibly concerned with reconstruction following WWII. It's a critique of industrialization, but also a critique of the pop movements resisting industrialization. It's the most difficult book I've ever read--took me several months to work through. But I treat it similarly to how Finnegans Wake should be treated: don't try to understand everything, but rather find something on every page you can relate to or appreciate.

number6 4y ago
I read a third and lost the drive. No real story. Description of Life und coping with randomness. Should I try again?
- newhaus1994 4y ago
  I think it's worth trying again--it has a story, but its plot structure is in direct conversation/opposition to the modernists, so it's looser, more chaotic, and more deconstructed. As such, I read GR forcing myself to let go of the pressure to comprehend the plot and rather to focus on the impressions the book was imparting on me. To be entirely clear: it's weird as hell.
- jrumbut 4y ago
  Yes, the second third is the best third. Allow me to recommend the audiobook version. It helps keep you moving forward during portions that are disgusting, boring, or jibberish.
  - number6 4y ago
    The audiobook version seems to be a good idea, since it has a lot of conversations. Thanks for the recommendation
    - jandrese 4y ago

everly 4y ago

If you want to like Pynchon but are daunted or put off by Gravity's Rainbow, start with Bleeding Edge (2013)

jrumbut 4y ago
Bleeding Edge might be of particular interest to the crowd here because it blends perspectives from at least 60 years of engineering, from the slide rules and rolled up sleeves of Pynchon's younger days to open source and web 2.0. I might recommend The Crying of Lot 49 over it though. It is weirder but also much faster moving.
- low_tech_love 4y ago
  I really liked TCoL49. It’s a weird feeling, reading I constantly felt like the author was making fun of me, like someone telling an elaborate lie just for the fun of knowing that people are falling for it. But I had so much fun that I just didn’t care; I wanted him to trick me into believing the whole meant something, because the trip was worth more than the destination.
  - itronitron 4y ago
    That book really opened up history for me, it would be interesting to pair that with 'Lies My Teacher Told Me' since so much of our knowledge of world history is based on third or fourth or fifth hand accounts.
  - a_bonobo 4y ago
    > like someone telling an elaborate lie just for the fun of knowing that people are falling for it I believe Pynchon is the grand master of telling Shaggy dog stories. Norm MacDonald was a huge fan of Pynchon, it feels like they had/have very similar humor.
spondylosaurus 4y ago
Bleeding Edge is amazing. I think it gets some flak for being a bit more surface-level than his better known works, but his prose is great as ever and some parts are genuinely chilling. Also one of the few novels where I feel like the pop culture references help instead of hinder it. I love the idea that this ancient ex-Navy guy knows enough about Metal Gear Solid to reference it in the context of DARPA and the internet as a tool of the cold war.

tomfunk 4y ago

my coworker begged me to read gravity's rainbow with him so i did. it was a slog. there are so many nuggets of interesting ideas and brilliant prose but the utter hostility to the reader made it possibly one of my least favorite reads in recent memory. i don't recommend it to anyone.

doitLP 4y ago
Doesn’t that mean it’s just a bad book? If the intention of art is to communicate a message it fails miserably. I have no patience for the college-kid “grand mystery of it all” thing. Like how so many festival films just cut to black unresolved. 99 times out of 100 it’s just lazy film making. The artist hiding behind a robe of impenetrability has no clothes on underneath.
- tomfunk 4y ago
  I think of critique in two ways: 1) Did the author, filmmaker, etc. effectively achieve what they were trying to do? and 2) Did I like it? So, in the first sense, I don't think it is "bad" because I believe this is exactly what the author was setting out to do in writing it. In the second sense, yes, it is a bad book in that I don't like it.
- flenserboy 4y ago
  Sometimes the complexity is necessary and is part of the actual art; it is this case when it comes to GR. Also: for those who like Pynchon, and would like another author whose work requires chewing, give William Gaddis a go.
- jrumbut 4y ago
  > the intention of art is to communicate a message That might not be the intention. Given the chaos of life, and especially the chaos of WW2, isn't it a little ridiculous to tell stories about it that are neat and clean and have a coherent logical flow? If humanity was like that there never would have been a WW2 to write about. I wouldn't want to only read Pynchon, but given how often we dream it makes sense to read a book that follows dream logic sometimes. It captures a very real part of the human experience that more plot or message focused literature leaves out.

danielvaughn 4y ago

I tried reading it years ago and gave up after a few pages. I might try again one day, but I don't like being actively confused when I'm trying to consume content via reading. It just frustrates me. Movies I can handle, like Adaptation is one of my favorite films of all time, and it "actively resists being understood" to quote another commenter here. Yet that approach translates much better to film than to literature IMO.

wk_end 4y ago
Adaptation is a great movie but I wouldn't really say it resists being understood - it tells a fairly straightforward narrative (the only catch, I guess, is the question of how much of the climax and denouement is "real" and how much of it is "cinema"). Even Charlie Kaufman's most recent film, "I'm Thinking of Ending Things", fits that bill an awful lot more I think.
alehlopeh 4y ago
Is consuming content by reading different than just reading?
- danielvaughn 4y ago
  Nope, a more concise way to phrase what I was trying to say was "reading" vs "watching".

the__alchemist 4y ago

I felt as I did reading parts 2 and 3 of The Divine Comedy; lost and humbled. I gave up after scratching the surface.

hackandthink 4y ago

I read "Gravity's Rainbow" ages ago when I had all the time of the world. Joshua Cohen's "Book of Numbers" feels sometimes pynchonesque. It's easier to read and set in the 90s. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/240498/book-of-numbers-by-joshua-cohen/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/240498/book-of-numb...

rooneymcnibnug 4y ago

My favorite book of all time, and still so extremely prescient to American culture/society. I wrote about a personal connection to this book - also touching on the idea of the preterite and paranoia - here: https://rooneymcnibnug.github.io/writing/2022/05/19/The-Watchers-and-Their-Zones.html https://rooneymcnibnug.github.io/writing/2022/05/19/The-Watc...

jackconsidine 4y ago

My attempt at GR was humbling. It took months, and like the author of this piece, I came away wondering what it was even about. Most advice I read insisted that I shouldn't get hung up on the details. Indeed, this and V. both kind of read like a dream to me, where I could subconsciously tune in and out and focus on certain details, but not all of them. That probably was the best tact for me, though I got to the end, frustrated at how many loose threads I was holding. Oh I also really didn't enjoy the constant song inventions- there probably were 50 of them and I had a hard time appreciating them

drivers99 4y ago

> put it down, and thought, like hundreds of thousands of other readers, I suspect, What The Hell Was That About? Oh, there was a story, there were characters, and it was possible to say what the book was “about” in banal terms. But I didn’t understand it at all. That's how I felt after reading the "The Illuminatus! Trilogy". Wikipedia says it's also postmodern so maybe that's why.

lubesGordi 4y ago
Every time I read a description of GR I think Robert Anton Wilson was probably inspired by that when he wrote The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Illuminatus is probably easier to understand though. Lots of references to Joyce in Illuminatus also. It's probably good prereq reading to GR.
mherdeg 4y ago
I powered through Illuminatus! -- it felt like a beach read version of Foucault's Pendulum to me. I loved it, but it's kind of astonishing that only a few things have stuck with me * Posters signed "The MGT" * The charming Rand satire * The idea of the word "fnord" * The feeling of the counterculture -- a kind of sheer weird paranoia where magic can be real. I have a paper copy I still leaf through but what stuck with me is that there was a time and place where it made perfect sense to go out and levitate the Pentagon. This book explains, or purports to explain, a certain kind of weirdness that underlies a lot of the stories about the 60s and 70s.

scott-smith_us 4y ago

I've tried to get through Gravity's Rainbow at least three times over the years, and I've always given up after a week or two. No matter how far in I get on each attempt, I'm just lost as to what's going on, who's talking, and how things are connected...

nemo44x 4y ago
> No matter how far in I get on each attempt, I'm just lost as to what's going on, who's talking, and how things are connected... That's totally normal for the first couple hundred pages. Just keep reading. Infinite Jest was sort of similar in this regard. But eventually you and the book come together and it really begins to flow. There's some really good stories and ideas in there, even after all these years. It's worth it.
- havblue 4y ago
  Having enjoyed infinite jest, I was looking for comparisons trying to determine if I could make it through GR as well. Reddit says Gravity's Rainbow makes infinite jest look like twilight in comparison...
  - romanhn 4y ago
    I posted about it above, but I tried to read Gravity's Rainbow right after Infinite Jest. While the latter was a bit confusing to follow early on, once you make sense of characters, it's pretty easy to keep going. The writing was fairly straightforward (even including the million side notes). I cannot say the same for GR. I gave up a third to a quarter in, having realized that I have no idea what's going on and that I can only follow the story line based on the Wikipedia summary. It definitely felt like a different level of convoluted compared to IJ.
    - nemo44x 4y ago
      I think you may have dropped GR right when it started to pick up a thread. You have to be willing to page back here and there when you pick up a reference you think you heard earlier to get clarity, but I had this with IJ too. Trust me, GR really starts to flow and becomes really funny. It’s literature crafted at a super high level of skill. I guess my point is you start to follow certain characters, certain other ones pop up again and again, and some come and go. It isn’t unusual to page back and reread a bit to refresh. But it really becomes a page turner eventually.

karaterobot 4y ago

I wrote a paper on Gravity's Rainbow without reading it, and got an A- on it, from which I conclude the professor either had not read my paper, or had not read Gravity's Rainbow. Either are possible. I prefer to believe that nobody has ever actually read Gravity's Rainbow.

paddw 4y ago
I think you can get an A- on a paper these days for writing anything remotely representing a cogent or lucid train of thought.
- itronitron 4y ago
  The comedian Father Guido Sarducci has a great joke about that.
- coldtea 4y ago
  You're describing much higher standards than what's the case...
Verdex 4y ago
I've only ever read the wikipedia summary. And from that much I actually wonder if the professor having read Gravity's Rainbow was more likely to have given your paper an A- than another professor who hadn't. Like the book sounds like if you were to truly understand it then you would no longer understand reality. And this suggests an interesting thought experiment in human comprehensibility. Does there exist some media where a totally ignorant analysis becomes more compelling once you have actually experienced the media being analyzed versus before you have experienced the media.
not2b 4y ago
I read it, decades ago. I have to confess that i skipped some of the dryer parts, so I probably read 80% of it. There were parts that were just amazing, and other parts not so much so. It was well worth it.
notahacker 4y ago

justinator 4y ago

I never read the book Gravity's Rainbow, but I had an art book that had a drawing for each page of Gravity's Rainbow, which makes me both want to read the book, and certainly not want to read the book, https://www.amazon.com/Pictures-Showing-Happens-Pynchons-Gravitys/dp/0977312798 https://www.amazon.com/Pictures-Showing-Happens-Pynchons-Gra...

I_complete_me 4y ago
At eighteen and a student of Civil Engineering in Cork, I got a J1 student visa to work in the USA for the summer. I recollect that I came across Gravity's Rainbow in a random bookshop in New York. It was lionized and it looked difficult so I bought it. I was staying in Far Rockaway and working on East 52nd Street in New York so the overall daily commute time was about 5 hours with numerous changes. I finished the book in the three months I was in America. When I came home, most people I spoke to about the book assumed that I'd lost my mind. I've never yet met anyone that has read it. I should add that a lot of it went over my head. I also managed to crack Rubik's Cube that summer. Heady days. That's over 40 years ago.

tatrajim 4y ago

In a powerful, if indirect, way Gravity's Rainbow changed my life. The idea that V2 rockets pockmarked London in a Poisson distribution blew my young mind. How could randomness be predicted?! It prompted me later to take a number of courses in statistics and probability, which deeply informed my academic career. Also, the sheer myth making of Thomas Pynchon as a literary hermit (rarely photographed or interviewed) proved influential on how I have chosen to live, albeit at a very different level of fame.

XorNot 4y ago

Good lord I got through, I think maybe a third of this before wiki'ing the synopsis and then putting it down forever. It goes absolutely no nowhere and I'm immensely glad I didn't waste my time.

nemo44x 4y ago

The great themes of this book to me are: Power is pathological and is a systemic thing. There are not conspiracies - it gains function from itself and the incentives it brings along with it, which go back into the system of power and make it even more powerful. Everyone just sort of goes along with it because it's just the way things are. Pavlov's dog is brought up often to sort of illustrate this. Of course like many post modern works of fiction and philosophy it blames just about everything on capitalism, which I don't agree with for a number of reasons, #1 being we haven't really had capitalism since the 1930s. We've had something far worse which is this managed economy and governance - a system of managerial elite that we call capitalism, but it ins't. But, the type of system doesn't matter in this book. The point is wars and things as crazy as an ICBM (the book really made me think of how insane it is to have designed a missile that destroys random people 100's of miles away) exist not for political reasons so much as money and acquiring power/money. Politics hardly matters and is a distraction to get people to buy into the stupidity of it all. In essence, a condemnation of consumerist culture which has taken the world by storm since this was published. It's actually a prescient book today with AI as it's also a critique of technology and how it doesn't free us, quite the opposite, and will probably end up in the destruction of man. Either with nukes as the book is obsessed with or climate, or naughty AI. Now the best part of the book and saddest is that all this is happening. It's the natural state of mankind. But there's no way to avoid it. It's inevitable. You can't change the world. Because anything you do that you believe is changing it will just be co-opd. We see this in everything today. Any kind "Revolutionary Change" is immediately used up by corporations that see to march in lockstep as if it's a conspiracy. But it's not - it's a numbers game based on incentives. The advice granted in the book is to fly under the radar, it is all you can do. Do not participate in society at large. Do not try and change it as anything good you make will just be used for evil eventually. (like the rockets in the book. invented initially by hobbyists who wanted to go to space; co-opted by politics to make bombs) Simply avoid it and find love and friends and happiness apart from the hideous system that strangles us.

KyleBrandt 4y ago

If reading, I would recommend a companion book, makes it easy to check references if you feel like you are missing too many things while reading. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0820328073/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&qid=&sr= https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0820328073/ref=tmm_pap_swatch...

deleted 4y ago

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randrus 4y ago

Read GR yonks ago, and it nearly killed me, but I still remember laughing til I cried at his description of being fed candies by the roommate of the woman he was pursuing. And growing bananas. I have no plans to read it again. OTOH I re-read V and The Crying of Lot 49 every decade or so and always have good time. But I liked Infinite Jest and have never made it cover-to-cover on anything by Joyce or Beckett.

stevenwoo 4y ago
I read it when availability was a huge virtue in the summer about forty years ago, it was either read it or reread something else. All I remember is the V2 development story and the guy who got off by eating excrement.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 4y ago

Gravity's Rainbow was supposed hard for me to read I thought COVID might have permanently damaged my brain. The whole work has this meandering dream-like quality that only achieves some semblance of a normal narratove for a few moments in the middle (the tip of the parabola I suppose). I would read several paragraphs and wonder how the hell we'd got to wherever we were, because it didn't seem related to where we were a page ago and I couldn't even remember what happened in between. I sometimes feel asleep mere sentences into a reading session. It took me nearly a year to work through. It is a fascinating work though, full of nuances and themes and connections everywhere you look. I probably only caught about a tenth of them. In that way it makes sense that Jonathan Blow referenced Gravity's Rainbow when talking about The Witness.

bigboxthrw 4y ago

good god. reading all these comments of how most have rarely made it past a small part of the book, how it is incomprehensible, how it is just like 2 other incomprehensible books, simply because the author decided to bury the reader under obscure and occult references to make them feel stupid instead of putting the book down and saying what crap. the book clearly sucks but you can't say that in polite company and must use a throwaway account. but you all know it is true. if that style was actually writing it could support writing short stories. why are these incomprehensible train wrecks of words always thousands of pages long? what is the author hiding behind the verbal gush?

csb6 4y ago
The book is 760 pages. That’s slightly less than Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. It is a standalone book, too, so no need to read a series of books to prepare (each of those could be 100s of pages as well!). In terms of plot-per-page, Pynchon is extremely efficient, if what you want is content. There are tons of characters and many subplots. It certainly isn’t “thousands of pages” long. Novels are by definition long-form stories. If what you want is a short story, a novel is never going to be a good fit.
- the__alchemist 4y ago
  I don't think the page count is a good metric here. For me, to comprehend something like this, I have to read, pause, ponder "what is going on?", reread etc. Sentence by sentence. For something easier, I can read fluidly. As a contrast, picture Neal Stephenson novels. Long! But I can read them ~5x faster than an equiv length of GR.
  - csb6 4y ago
    I agree, page count is a bad way to judge books. I was using the parent comment’s logic, which disparaged Pynchon for writing long novels and implied that long novels are less valuable.
  - stuxnet79 4y ago

loudandskittish 4y ago

Damn, these comments are scaring me. I recently added the book to my to-read list after learning that it was a big influence on Hideo Kojima, but now I'm worried about what I'm getting myself into. I suppose I should at least, finally, finish Infinite Jest to prime myself.

egl2021 4y ago

Philip Morrison praised GR in his Scientific American column. That was good enough for me: I read GR and eventually all of Pynchon's other novels. V is one of the books I fall back on when I need something for a trip with lots of expected airport layovers.

uxp100 4y ago

Gravity’s Rainbow also has a lot to say about race relations (in the 60s in the US) and colonialism. Just saying it Since it hasn’t been mentioned and I’d consider that one of its more important themes. Another thing not mentioned is the rather casual sex with children, though I think there is some argument on Bianca’s age. There’s probably a million other themes, odd occurances, extremely long joke setups, and disgusting or offensive passages that haven’t been mentioned. But my advice is read it with a guide, a reading group, or a podcast (Pynchon in public is one such podcast). And don’t fret over following it closely, or sometimes, at all. You can always read it again. I’m not exactly a Pynchon superfan, I love many of his quirks others hate (the songs, the names) but the long novels are just a bit too much for me. I do think it’s worth a try. You can always quit, it’s a 50 year old novel, not many people are really all that attached to it anymore. Its cultural influence is waning.

rokkitmensch 4y ago
I filed Bianca under the horrors of war along with the kids camps where the V1 staff got to visit with their children. The book in question is magical, hilarious, scatological, horrifying. There are scenes and themes from it burned into my consciousness as ineradicably as the slow stab from Saving Private Ryan. Like the turd-swallowing one!

VagueMag 4y ago

"So Gravity's Rainbow, in the sense that it's about how humans act in global systems of control, is really about the birth of the Internet." ... "Pynchon's intent was to expose the incorporation of the Nazi project into US militarism. Requires a specific kind of critical engagement." https://twitter.com/cuttlefish_btc/status/701271529565384704?t=h3bxN3F2rZ2klCNrj2qc5A&s=19 https://twitter.com/cuttlefish_btc/status/701271529565384704...

crabkin 4y ago
Honestly there's some element of that in there, quite obviously with all the operation paperclip innuendo, I mean after the war was won, one of the first orders of business was copying the rocket from the Germans. Recently I read about Peter Thiel's favorite philosopher Rene Girard, and having in mind GR which I read this last year, and the whole thing about burnt offerings, about the illusion of two sides, etc.. Has me thinking there's also a whole thing about "cosmic" scapegoating, human sacrifice, etc.. all mashed up in there too.
- VagueMag 4y ago
  We didn't just copy the rockets from them though, their leadership was absorbed into the highest levels of the U.S./NATO military/intelligence/scientific communities. I feel like the NASA stuff gets all the attention while almost none is paid to the mind control (definitely alluded to in GR) and biological/chemical/nuclear warfare research. (In paranoid conspiracy circles I've even heard some ~interesting~ questions posed about Thiel's family background!)

jonjacky 4y ago

I think it is notable that I read it when it came out fifty years ago, and haven't re-read it since, but I still remember many scenes vividly - I remember parts of it much better than most books I read back then, or in the years since. The book is a mosaic, or collage, of a many short pieces ranging from just a few, to several, or many, pages each. They vary from funny and silly to deliberately revolting or horrifying. This mix is very unsettling but I found it effective. Instead of a clear plot or narrative line, all these fragments have a cumulative effect -- this makes the book impossible to summarize. Scattered amongst the fragments are some with significant mathematical and engineering content. For example there is an explanation of how the onboard V-2 guidance circuits use capacitors to accumulate charge, performing a double integration to calculate distance travelled from acceleration, to determine when to turn off the engine. I found this quite surprising and unusual at the time. I think it still would be today.

julianeon 4y ago

This part of the review comes dangerously close to clickbait grifting: > Pynchon has become an infinite play space for academics, just as all his books are still in print and read by ordinary people, but somehow the arbiters of literary taste on both sides of the Atlantic decided long ago that Pynchon was Not Serious and so Not of Interest. The thing is that academics are the arbiters of literary taste. So a book cannot be both “an infinite play space” for an audience while being simultaneously “Not of Interest” to that audience. It can be one, or it can be the other, but it can’t be both.

oska 4y ago
> The thing is that academics are the arbiters of literary taste Is that true? I wouldn't have thought so. Professors of literature are a fairly new thing (say one hundred years) while literary taste has been a thing for many hundreds of years. I'd suggest that other/former arbiters of literary taste would include intellectuals, literary salons, the aristocracy, the clergy, other writers, and always too a populist element (books without any appeal to the populace rarely survive to be elevated to the canon).

alex-moon 4y ago

I read this book in full back in my early 20s, before I had much real life experience. I've tried to read it again since then, but I always get to the story of Franz Poekler, right in the middle, and it's so upsetting that I have to put the book away at that point.

vibrolax 4y ago

I was defeated in my first couple of attempts to reach page 100 in _GR_, so I picked up _The Crying of Lot 49_ to get a handle on pynchonism. That confirmed for me that reading _GR_ would pay off, if I could get past the early world building. Pynchon replaced Vonnegut as a central voice in my worldview, as I felt Vonnegut had settled into self-plagiarism. Thirty years later, Vonnegut is restored to his rightful place in my worldview, along with Pynchon (who has since become the self-plagiarizer). There is plenty of redeeming value.

MaysonL 4y ago

https://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Gravity%27s_Rainbow_-_Page_by_Page https://gravitys-rainbow.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?titl...

dogman1050 4y ago

This is the only book I've ever thrown away. I bought it while an engineering undergrad and couldn't stay interested. I tried again 10 years later and gave up. Tried it again when I was about 40 and decided I would never get through it and didn't want to be tempted anymore. I already have a bigger reading list than I can ever finish in my lifetime.